DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE ...

Just got back from a four-day trip to Crestline and Riverside, California - about 100 miles east towards Arizona. It was mainly "family business" and something I'd wanted to do for some time now.

Crestline, up in the mountains north of San Bernardino, is where Dad's sister Aunt Helen has lived for a couple decades, and since he's died, I've tried to get up to see her at least twice a year. Ann, who has been mainly in charge of property upkeep for Dad's estate, had Helen's handyman John paint the outside this summer since it was looking pretty ragged, and wanted me to take some pictures so she could see what he had done. We hope to put it on the market eventually - perhaps within the next year. (Dad had the house constructed specially for Helen in the early '90s so she could live in the mountains rent-free for as long as her health permits.) I stopped there first to visit Helen and get a mitochondrial DNA sample of inner cheek cells for Family Tree DNA , a genealogical testing lab in Houston; Helen is the last female link genetically to our grandmother and her female line of descendence back into the mists of Scandinavian history, so I wanted a record of her DNA before she, too, passes on. (Dad also carried the same genetic information, but getting DNA samples from him at this point would be pretty awkward - and macabre, to say the least!) But I digress ...

Riverside, a fairly major city I've never really visited, has ties to Grandma Sundberg's early years in America. She immigrated from Sweden in 1908 with her brother Frank and came straight out to Riverside to get established, living in the beginning with two uncles, brothers of her father, who was a farmer in southern Sweden (Skåne province right across from Copenhagen). She worked first as a housemaid in the homes of wealthy citizens of Riverside, saving up $1000 (or so) to pay for a Lutheran college out in Kansas (Bethany College) - a sizable sum in those days. She returned to California and, in 1915, married my grandfather, Ernst Sundberg, a "city slicker" from LA who taught high school math, also, a good Swedish Lutheran. After that, the couple lived in Los Angeles until they both died (1963 and 1958 respectively).

This was all part of oral family history, but I had nothing to confirm or disconfirm the details. A week before I left, I looked up a bunch of Lutheran churches in Riverside on the web and emailed them all, asking where the Lutheran archives for Riverside might be located and which church(es) might have been around in the early 20th century. A few church secretaries emailed me back, and the finger seemed to point to Eden Lutheran Church, founded by Swedes in 1888. In fact, even before I left, the secretary from Eden emailed to say she had located Selma Carlson's name in the church membership book and gave me the date she had been "received" into membership - September 20, 1908.

The present Eden Lutheran Church is neither in the same building nor even the same location as the original wooden building, but the congregation and all its files moved together in the early 1950's. When I arrived, Marilyn, the secretary who had responded to my email, greeted me and handed me a huge log book (3' x 2') and showed me the page my grandmother was mentioned on. It was comforting to see it down on paper, but a little disappointing that it was only one page. After I started snooping around the book, however, I slowly came to realize I had stumbled on a gold mine of family information. Not only did it mention Selma Carlson (the membership line stretches across two huge pages), but her brother Frank, and on page 1, an "Ernest Carlson" along with his wife Ida and four children and, on page 2, a "Carl Carlson" along with his wife Ida (popular name!) and their four children.

This confirmed the very vague oral account that "a couple of uncles were already out there", but I had never heard their names mentioned, or even their existence until I spoke with Dad's cousin Alice in Michigan this summer. But Alice couldn't remember the names. But here they both were, carefully hand-written in the huge volume along with - very importantly - their place of origin. Carlsons in Sweden are a krona a dozen, but Carlsons from Glimåkra, Skåne could only be relatives, since the town is a postage stamp. (Aunt Helen later confirmed that yes, the family used to visit an "Uncle Ernest" in Riverside when she was a young girl.) This was just as exciting as finding my grandmother's name in the book, since it meant we now had a huge new branch of the Swedish side of the family we had never even known, some descendents likely still living in the area.

Importantly, the membership book also listed the year members arrived in the US and when they reached Riverside (many lived in the Midwest for a time before continuing their immigration west). Now we knew that Selma and Frank had left Sweden in 1908 for sure (Dad only remembered that his mother was "about 16") and that they had come straight west to California from Ellis Island - most likely by train. Now, Riverside is not the kind of place a new immigrant would pick out of a hat when they arrived in the US unless they already had contacts there, so this bolstered the account that they had pre-existing relatives in the location: Uncle Carl and Uncle Ernest and their families. And Ernest and his family were some of the charter members of Eden Church, there when it was founded in 1888 - the first name listed on page 1, in fact! (The church secretary there was very impressed! She ended up giving me a nicely illustrated church centennial book as a gift.)

One mystery, however, was that no mention of Selma's marriage date was written in the book. Family lore said the pair had married in Riverside, so it seemed odd that the church she was a member of wouldn't have recorded it. I next visited another old Lutheran church down the street - Trinity Lutheran - but their list of marriages went back only to the 1940's. It looked like the civil county records office was the next best place to check.

I had assumed one merely had to go up to the recorder's window, give the employee the names and wedding date, and they would check a database to verify the information, but no. You had to pay for a certified reprint of the original marriage license. - $13. Whatever. She called some other office, and they faxed their microfilm photocopy - and when she handed it to me eventually, we both agreed that it was too degraded visually. I could barely read the names! She recommended I go straight to the regional office and get a fresh photocopy "right off the printer", so I did. I now have an official County of Riverside Marriage License (modern official stationery) with a print of the original license, which helpfully contains not only the couple's names and marriage date, but the names of witnesses (Ernst's sister Esther Sundberg and some unknown best man from Nebraska, a Victor Pearson) and - most importantly - the name of the officiating pastor, the Rev. L. N. Dahlsten, who, it turns out, was pastor at Eden Lutheran during 1915. So, Selma stayed loyal to Eden up through the wedding, but it was still odd the membership book had a blank, mentioning only a membership transfer to "Los Angeles".

After Riverside, I drove back north to Crestline (about an hour's drive) to see Helen a second time and get the second DNA sample (they had to be taken at least 8 hours apart). When I mentioned the oddity concerning Selma's wedding information being absent in the ledger, Helen said, "Well, of course! They didn't get married in the church. They had the ceremony at Mission Inn." (Mission Inn is a huge rambling mission-style hotel in Riverside dating back to the 1870's.) So, now all I have to do is write the Mission Inn historical museum to see if there is any record of Selma and Ernst's wedding there. Since the Inn has been a "big thing" locally since its beginning - presidents slept there - it's very likely they've kept careful records - unlike, say, the Motel 6 in Riverside along Interstate 10!